Fires of Jharia spell death and disease for villagers

The inhabitants of a remote village at the heart of Indias coal industry brave deadly sinkholes and toxic gases simply to survive

In the village of Liloripathra, in a remote corner of Indias eastern Jharkhand state, mother-of-three Sushila Devi grips the hands of two women sitting on either side of her. Coal fires spew clouds of smoke into the already heavy, polluted air.

At about 8pm, a policeman cradling a small body wrapped in black plastic bags emerges through the smoke and the crowds that have gathered around her home. He has come to deliver the body of her 13-year-old daughter Chanda, killed along with two others from the village when a coal mine caved in on top of them. They had been scavenging in a colliery operated by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a subsidiary of state-owned Coal India.

Chanda was a very beautiful, but quiet girl. I cant believe God gave such a girl to me, Devi recalls, after identifying the body.

In the mornings after shed woken up, shed comb her hair and put lipstick on and then ask me how she looked before she left for the mine. That was her routine every day.

At dawn the next morning, the village mourns as the victims bodies are loaded into the back of a truck and transported to the banks of the river Damodar, which straddles the border separating the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal. In nearby woodland, a group of men from the village take turns to dig three shallow graves, before bringing the bodies to be buried.

BCCL have been running the mines in Jharia since the government nationalised the coking coal industry in 1971. In a rush to curtail financial losses and meet the countrys staggering energy demands, BCCL began switching from underground mining to open cast mining (where coal is mined from the surface), an easier and more profitable method of extraction. Over time, vast expanses of land were stripped and blasted into 400ft-deep pits, which today produce more than 32m tonnes of coal a year.

But this unregulated expansion has been at the expense of the communities who once lived off the land. With few jobs available to those without a formal education, many of Jharias residents work as coal loaders for roughly 1,000 rupees (about 11) a week, or risk their lives scavenging coal to scrape a living.

Three miles from Liloripathra, in Laltanganj village, a crater of fire one of at least 67 fires that have been burning under Jharia since 1916 coughs up gases laden with carbon monoxide and sulphur oxide. No one knows for certain what caused the fire to start, but scientists suspect that coal spontaneously combusted at an abandoned mine that hadnt been decommissioned properly. There is, though, agreement that it was the shift to open cast mining that exposed the flames to oxygen, which in turn caused the fires to increase in ferocity and break the surface, hampering decades-long efforts to put them out.

In 2008, BCCL began implementing a resettlement programme, managed by a body called the Jharia Rehabilitation and Development Authority, to relocate people living in fire-affected areas. In their master plan, the JRDA said that at least 79,159 families would need to be rehoused by 2021. But in 2016, the former minister of coal, Piyush Goyal, admitted to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Indias parliament, that so far only 4,049 families approximately 5% of those eligible had been relocated.

In Belgharia, BCCLs flagship resettlement site, Viljai Bauri looks out from the roof of a faded apartment block, one of 400 that make up the township in a new development that will house the next batch of families who lose their homes to the fires.

In 2008, Bauri was relocated to Belgharia from the village of Bokapahari, which has since been swallowed up by flames. Home is now an 8ft by 8ft room next to a sewage pipe, which he shares with his wife Sumo Devi and 11 members of her family. There isnt space for all of them, so they take it in turns to sleep on the floor.

I am very angry. The health of my wife has deteriorated I think she has TB, he says. There are no health facilities here. They came and asked us to spit in a pot, but then never returned. Weve been neglected by the government. At least in Bokapaharai we could access hospitals and see a doctor.

Anil Kumar Jha, the chairman of Coal India, believes safety measures at the mines are in line with international standards. There are accidents and people have died also. But such types of incidents are reducing with each passing year. Our safety parameters can be compared with any other country, he says.

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